The side effect of this though, is that it's an extremely painful process for the applicant. Even if you're a great software engineer, you're going to freeze up, miss something, have a bad day, and fail a few interviews. Now for most software engineers failure is an unusual and harrowing experience, so they react really badly to it. Especially ina scenario where it's difficult to blame anyone but yourself. But just don't! It's fine! just move on, there's plenty of jobs and the interview process is a blunt tool, not a final evaluation of your worth in life.

“Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I can’t modify the argument”) that’s great (or says “I can’t remember if strlen includes the 0 byte so I’ll add 1 — normally I’d look it up”) - again, no trick questions.

When I say “simple” it’s something like atoi or “shuffle a deck of cards”: basic, but not 100% trivial like fizzbuzz.

On of our best hires was a guy who made a fundamental mistake — when we asked him if it world work as intended he said “I’m a fucking idiot” and fixed it. You’re not supposed to talk like that in an interview I supposed but we read it as a strong positive signal.

We had one candidate who insisted that parsing a string and returning an integer was an unreasonable question because there was already a library function for it. “But what if you have an embedded system and no library?” (an actual situation for us, for part of our system). He was adamant — honestly that was a failure of the phone screen: had it been caught it would have saved us, and him, from wasting time.

Trying to debate the interview format or reject interview questions is one of my hard-stop rejection triggers in interviews now.

The couple times I’ve been part of hiring pipelines where candidates argued about the interview itself and then got hired anyway, they became extremely difficult employees within the company. Arguing about interview questions turned into arguing about every other ticket, code reviews, and every architecture choice.

I’ve had the same experience where we take an actual problem we solved in our codebase and turned it into a small interview problem. Same thing: Some candidates will try to debate the relevance or try to wriggle out of it.

Sometimes we want harmony and not drama.

Knowing how to push forward without being abrasive is a more valuable trait.

Sometimes you just have to "document your objection, but do it anyway."

It seems that “able to code a simple problem well” is a far less ridiculous proxy for good software engineer than “able to code a hard problem at all”. Much to my surprise.

The software industry is notorious for underestimating overall complexity factors, understanding uncertainty, and time to manage them and interviews seem to be no different. So “simple” problems are often good (I agree with you) because they’re actually not so simple for most people when you factor everything in, they’re often reasonably challenging under the set of circumstances.

Meanwhile genuinely difficult problems (in any arbitrary setting and longer timelines) require a whole lot of rote training and reusing little clever idiosyncratic techniques that may or may not be generally useful, so you very often end up with a question lottery on whether you already know how to address the problem in question or not correctly vs having some problem where a reasonable solution and expectations around that can be derived in the time (and environment) it’s taking place. Lots of nonsense.

When I worked for more medium sized companies, I'd get software engineering candidates who obviously did not even remotely know how to code. Imagine the worst possible software candidate, and then lower your expectation even further. One couldn't even tell me what an "int" was. I think a single "for loop on a whiteboard" question would filter out at least 50% of candidates.

Almost everyone embellishes their resume. Some do it to an extreme. The first stage should be weeding these people out, and any hiring manager learns this lesson very quickly.

Story: I learned this as a hiring manager early on. I was the resume screener, first contact and then last contact. Everyone in between was my team and other adjacent teams. I failed to ask the right questions in a phone screen and when we brought this guy on-site he failed very bad. Even worse, he broke down begging for for another problem he could solve.

It was bad for everyone and we were a very accommodating group that gives many tries. We weren't looking for perfect answers to one question.

"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

It says barely anything about the universities and everything about the student. If a student just wants to just have a perfunctory gargle at the fountain of knowledge instead of drinking as deeply as they can, that's on them.

Truth is, I'm never looking for "the best", I'm looking for "good enough to do the job competently". Because we can hem and haw over what is best for hours. And we could disagree with what qualities in what proportion make someone "the best". But we can all generally agree with "could do the job". As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're hiring right now and we have the duality of candidates in our pool.

There's one guy who is just a hard no from at least two people in the group. And that translates into a no from the third member simply because we're so adamant that he's not the guy. And there's another who we're all feeling really solid on. Not "the best", but solid floor and we feel they'll be able to learn.

But being able to weed out people who can't even perform the basics despite having a decent resume is invaluable.

Fwiw this is surprisingly subtle and non-trivial to get right. A naive "random swap" approach does not produce uniform permutations. Sorting based on a random comparison function can likewise produce biased results depending on the implementation of the sort. Tagging each element with a random number and then sorting based on the tag works (or so I think?) but you need to deal with the case where tags collide. Fisher-yates shuffle is bulletproof but I would not trust myself to write it from memory lest you end up writing Sattolo's algorithm instead.

At the end of the day the question is: “could this person do the job and could they work with others in the process?”

Though I still do start with a short fizzbuzz-level question because you would be surprised how many people fail that and it makes it way less awkward if you start with atoi and they can't write a loop.

If they fail fizzbuzz I generally just turn the interview into a chat or give them easy questions to practice, rather than say "yeah no thanks", because I feel like the latter is a bit mean, and everyone can benefit from interview practice.

It’s kind to politely ramp the interview down in that case but I’ve learned to then cut off any later interviews. It’s a waste of the company’s time and the candidate’s too.

If we were going to have lunch the recruiter takes them to lunch anyway, unless the (now former) candidate doesn’t want to.

I've never been through the "regular" IT hiring process myself, but I've interviewed several candidates for an Android developer position. I liked asking questions and looking at how the person thinks. I didn't expect exact correct answers for every question, I just wanted to see whether they have a fundamental understanding of Android. After that, they had to build a small app at home (not my initiative) to show their skills.

I've seen this reasoning, but I'm wondering if this is actually true, especially if you also believe the other myth in hiring: most people applying are not qualified for the job. Since most hiring actually requires you to fill the position in the end (in other words, you can't leave it open indefinitely if no one qualifies as eventually the pressure to hire mount up), every false negatives does increase the odd of you hiring a false positives as well. Just take the example at the extreme, if there is only ever one person on Earth qualified for your job and you got a false negatives on him, there is no other way but getting an idiot in the job.

Someone who does well on leetcode is usually easy to teach so they will become good/great in a year or two, but if you don't have that time then go for leetcode+experience just like everyone else is.

We would work together at the whiteboard, with me teaching them the basics of our application domain and our internal distributed computation framework. Then there were a series of 5 increasingly difficult iterations we'd work through. First, do a simple calculation. Now there's a need for a more difficult computation. And an even harder one. Then explain that it needs to run over billions of log lines, and it's I/O bound, so let's make it faster. Finally, a problem that requires them to probe me deeply about the nature of the data and only needs a hand-wavy answer (calculate a median in a single pass with limited memory - not too bad once you extract from me that the samples are all integers between 0 and 500). To the candidate, this looked like iteration driven by evolving requirements, not 5 interview questions.

I mostly let them drive, but I jump in now and then to keep things on pace. And I would try to answer any question the same way I would as a teammate / mentor.

They don't need to get every problem right. The increasing difficulty is designed so that almost everyone gets something right and something wrong (< 1% gets all the way through the last one). That's an opportunity for me to give supportive feedback to see how they respond. The best responses to feedback yielded something like "oh cool, I can also use that over here to simplify the code". The worst was someone insisting that you can flip the order of addition and division without changing the answer (i.e., order of operations doesn't matter), me saying "I think it does matter, try doing 1/2 + 1/4 in different orders", and them saying "no I have a math degree, I know what I'm talking about."

What they do need to do is be able to solve problems collaboratively, extract learning from an eager mentor, and extrapolate from those learnings to solve problems. The best candidates start finding trade-offs across the application domain / tech tooling boundary that I haven't even brought up.

One of the downsides is that it takes a while to calibrate as an interviewer, and that calibration is not entirely transferrable across interviewers, as candidates will respond differently to different interviewers. I did this interview thousands of times (my record was 14 times in one day, and frequently 20+ times a week - we were scaling an org from ~50 engineers to over 1,000). I never stopped learning about signals I was seeing, but I was mostly calibrated after a few dozen candidates. Leet code calibration is much more transferrable, but what use is that if it's not measuring what matters?

One thing that I think leet code interviews get very wrong is that interviews involve two sides trying to evaluate each other. Wearing people down with leet code is not a good pitch for your work environment. Many candidates told me at the end of my interview that they were shocked at how much fun/educational an interview could be, and many hires said that this interview style was the reason they accepted our offer over more lucrative offers, because they felt they would learn more and have more fun with us.

Depends where you’re looking in the hiring pipeline. If you’re looking at raw applications submitted to a publicly listed job posting, I can say without reservation that the majority of candidates are not qualified. The pre-screening candidate pool is extremely bad on average, especially for remote job listings. Some people spend all day clicking the apply button on every job listing they see.

Your post constrains another misunderstanding about the hiring process: The goal isn’t to hire the first person through the system who is good enough to pass some arbitrary threshold. The goal is collect a number of candidates and hire the best one. People hate this reality, but it’s true.

I definitely do not have any misunderstanding here, and my description of hiring is the same as what you wrote, just in different phrasing: after a period of time, the company has to pick a candidate, presumably the best one by their interview signals.

I am disputing the standard claim of "it's better to have false negatives than false positives" by pointing out how that mindset does not work: since you have to choose someone anyway, the whole "avoiding false positives" might not be a thing at all

As someone who’s done a lot of interviews, this is very true for SWE roles.

this would make sense if they filled these positions in 2,3 weeks tops. But that's the insane part; I hear of interviews going on for 6-7 stages now, lasting almost 6-10 weeks. At that point I feel you are no longer avoiding false positives, but simply hiring the most desperate programmers willing to jump the hoops. The best candidates will get an offer mid interview at that rate.

>But just don't! It's fine! just move on,

I've been "just moving on" for some 9 months now. There's only so much morale in a tank, no matter how BS you know the whole process is. I just wanna move on in life, not be bogged down on how many permutations you can color an N x M grid with.

Best tests are simple and common computer science problems in algorithms and data structures with no tractable solutions. There is no facile answer, you truly have to reason from first principles for any particular scenario because there is no alternative.

Totally, but leetcode wont filter them out.

Incompetent is fairly easy to navigate around, pathological bastardness is impossible to work past. I know that some companies use psychometric tests, but they are not based in anything remotely scientific, but are also super easy to game.

Coding challenges won’t filter every pathological bad hire, but coding challenges do catch a lot of bad hires.

LeetCode shouldn’t be the entirety of the interview. It’s just part of it.

leetcode doesn't catch bad hires, as someone whos done a lot of interviews, we could easily catch "bad" coders with a very simple whiteboard test or a "look at this code and tell me what you think"

but people being bad at code aren't the company killers, its the toxic people who are "good" at coding that do. They can be very good at these kind of tests, but are absolute shites to work with.

I think we actually agree more that I let on, and you are right that coding tests should only be a part of the interview process.

But in fact even in at-will situations, firing aversion seems to be a real and expensive issue that all kinds of managers in organizations face [1] [2].

So, in one sense I agree, bad hires are existential threats "only" because we don't fire them fast enough. On the other hand, have you ever had to fire someone yourself? Try it. It's heart-wrenching, even to a heartless utility monster like yours truly.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/firing_aversion_2.h...

[2]: https://www.econlib.org/firing-and-the-left/

I do work in a team where majority was hired by puzzles of sorts. All of them are smart. They are not software engineers and it shows massively.

Most programming work needs common sense a lot more than it needs theoretical algorithmic knowledge.

And almost nobody values good documentation, especially as a competetive advantage.

Coming from Real Engineering and making 2x more programming, I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software.

We are programmers dealing with layers upon layers of abstraction. Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science.

I did do safety critical C code and Assembly which are probably my hole in the whole 'its not engineering'. But javascript/python/backend work: programming.

The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline, and the nitpicking you can have on any particular topic that is/isn't engineering-y can be applied across the board.

But this conversation is totally moot IMO because if you have a bachelors in computer science or software engineering, and a masters in the same discipline, and several years experience, you can apply and become the same chartered engineer from the same association that does "real" engineering.

I see it as a difference in time and stakes.

We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die.

This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house, but it’s a rare shaman who can consistently estimate software projects well.

Once we’ve built software for even a few hundred years, we’ll probably have it pretty dialed in, too.

We write software that has killed people due to bugs too, such as Therac-25 releasing too much beta radiation killing patients.

> This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house

My parents and in-laws are property developers and I've also been involved in a build; not one was on time or budget. Some are really off budget, beyond the scale software projects that mess up are. In China they've had projects run into the billions and be decades late.

I do understand your points, but this is what I mean when I say you can nitpick any issue with software not being Real Engineering and apply it to other engineering categories too.

But yeah we may have a very different process in 50 or 100 years. I'm only 10 years into my career and it's already pretty different to when I started!

There definitely is. Safety/mission critical code is definately a more rigorous, formal process where you don't just download a library for padding a string (you probably wouldn't use built-in strings anyway on this kind of code).

But I agree that the way most coding works (i.e. move fast and fail often) is completely antithetical to how engineers should work. But there's infinite moneys and almost zero accountability, so who's gonna stop them?

>Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science.

that's definitely why I fully agree with calling programmers creatives over engineers. once you get past dead simple problems, no two programmers are going to approach a prompt the exact same way. performance, scalabiliy, documenting, version control friendliness, even ephemeral stuff like code style. coders very much are artists who happen to know a lot of math.

One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields. A ton of software engineers did not study software. They learned to program as part of their engineering studies, and they believe that they learned both Computer Science and their engineering topic at the same time.

I may be biased, but I see fewer computer scientists pretend to be mechanical engineers because they once tuned a PID.

If Bachelor of Science computer science grads were that much more extraordinary, they wouldnt be working side by side with non-degreed programmers.

Chem Engineer here, I wrote random forest once. My coworker with a CS degree, all front end work.

It's just a job title, arguably one without the protections or standards afforded to chartered engineers, and with an incredibly low barrier to entry. Pretty much the reason we have to do this ridiculous dance with tech tests, LeetCode, and 12 stage interview processes.

It is a downgrade in my opinion.

And because they ask pretty irrelevant questions, the 6 weeker will do better then the recent Stanford PhD who has been studying a specific problem for 5 years or the multimillionaire who spent the past 10 years building and selling successful software companies.

Those people will fail and your 6 weeker who's never heard of cmake, diff or gdb will pass.

When I see there's leetcode as the hiring process I presume the place is full of bozos because the process actually strongly preferences them.

Recently I failed the first round of a fintech analyst position because I didn't complete the 9 undergrad (or high-school, in certain talented schools) math problems (I have a math PhD) in the 1 hour time frame. In retrospect, I should've cheated using computer/online assistance, and my true failure was my unwillingness to cheat. Not because fintech analysts are cheaters, but because the testing process is nonsense, so recognizing that, one should cheat it (indeed, an analyst mindset!) I'd rather be jobless than to adopt that mentality though. (and in fact I am, the only job I was able to find was a minimum wage service-type job, it can't even pay for daycare, I'd rather raise my child on my own while wife works thank God.)

We have high-interest rates and global crises resulting in companies not hiring while simultaneously governments give orders to news media to tout the strong economy. Ineffective hiring practices will always exist, but people don't complain when jobs are available; you only see this type of discussion online when things have gone sideways.

Integrity is really tested when it costs you something. I'd call this a true win.

(I recognize there are dire situations where cheating might be warranted. I hope you're not there yet.)

Either it wasn't a true "zero" but rather they were really good e.g. at advanced math or physics and managed to see some parallels, or it has to be a genius. I'd be very interested in hiring such a person.

The code to solve basically all of them look nearly identical after you classify it and the questions asked (what's the big O of this) are also all identical.

It's an extremely narrow and teachable class of problems.

There's outliers for sure but the 80th percentile are basically just the same damn things slightly rephrased. It's extremely gameable and doesn't test the kind of breadth say, fixing a crashing program would show.

Here's a list of 16 https://github.com/Chanda-Abdul/Several-Coding-Patterns-for-... ... That's the 99th percentile.

If you think someone passing that means they can fix the conda bug in your k8s cluster or whatever real problem you have, dream on. It'd be like hiring a cook by quizzing them on the names of kitchen utensils.

The other way round (people who code, but can't leetcode) I agree it's an issue. Unfortunately as noted here in comments, cost of a bad hire is much much worse than cost of a no-hire, so it's the price I'm willing to pay.

Excellent! That’s a something, a something you can measure. Back when I was involved in hiring, it was definitely better than not having that (at junior levels).

However, the idea that “IQ is all you need” is so obviously false that I think you need to reconsider. Bill Gates famously, (infamously?), hired for IQ. Microsoft used puzzles as their IQ proxy, and I think leetcode is just a modern variant. Possibly a worse version, as training has a bigger effect.

Bill Gates later would claim that he overvalued intelligence. I would say that intelligence is necessary but insufficient. We would get further, faster, with a quick IQ test and then dig into the candidates experience, communication ability and personality. No need to study!

The FAANG companies all have a line a mile long of candidates willing to put up with any amount of BS for a chance to work for the name and $$. If you aren’t such a company, trying to hire that game changing person for $$’s you can afford to pay is going to require a different approach.

I think the mass trained at bootcamp is an exaggeration. The best bootcampers are those that use it as an extended education from learning the traditional ways. I'm sure most people here complaining about leetcode can indeed spend 6 weeks there and be interview ready. But few have that time nor spare cash lying around for such a venture. And why should we need to spend thousands just to ace a quiz like it's some SAT?

>cost of a bad hire is much much worse than cost of a no-hire, so it's the price I'm willing to pay.

At this point I wonder. Hearing way more stories about "survivors" from layoffs burning out from jobs that keep promising that they'll hire more staff to help out with. When in reality they have a hiring freeze or are trying to offshore the work that ends up needing more time to be fixed.

The stalls in a no-hire aren't just costing money in the lack of productivity, it's costing currently working employees who are doing 2,4, 8+ jobs without any meaningful increase in role/salary. It's not sustainable. You're draining a little bit of blood from a rock, but the rock is clearly starting to crumble.

If I genuinely wanted a job again all I'd do is go to one of those drilling game websites for a few nights and then say whatever the interviewer is looking for.

Any test I can fail one day and pass 3 days later that is ostensibly supposed to assess whether I have skills that take 15 years to master is total bullshit.

The initial stated problem was different: false-positives, bad engineers practicing for 6 weeks will pass the test. That I seriously doubt is a real thing. If they managed to learn that fast, they must be good. They could be junior-good -- that's perfectly fine, you need to hire juniors too. You don't judge seniority solely based on leetcode results.

I could be wrong, but I think dynamic-programming problems belong in that list.

But it's entirely pointless.

They give the candidate some messy, done-in-a-hurry code (but not purposefully obfuscated) and ask them to refactor it to the best of their ability. The interviewer sits next to the candidate and talks to them throughout the whole process. It's pretty much pair programming, but the candidate has the initiative.

I found it to be a breath of fresh air after all the leetcode interviews. Of course, they have the luxury of doing this, because they know what exact technologies they are using and they don't need to measure candidate's ability to learn new tech, etc. In their situation they are more interested in topics like whether the candidate can produce maintainable code, name things properly or communicate with co-workers.

Well leetcode interviews do not measure the candidate's ability to learn new tech either, do they?

Although I don't find it very relevant. When I was fresh out of university, I was good with algorithms / data structures (neither of which I use much in actual work), therefore able to pass leetcode interviews just fine. Yet it was at the time challenging for me to learn new frameworks and I found all of the tooling I never heard of rather confusing.

If you are looking to hire people to write < 50 line snippets, it works fine. Pretty much useless for everything else.

The big companies that have LeetCode in their process also have system design, behavioral, resume review, and experience review as part of the process.

I’m sure some bad companies are using LeetCode as the entire interview process, but it’s not how it’s normally used.

What's super interesting is I have actually had people pretty much fail the basic stuff (which was probably nerves) and then go on and kill the code review section in ways that shows their serious expertise.

IMO interviews are pretty bad at demonstrating people's ability to work, but if you can zoom in and out on a problem and do good enough on the coding stuff its usually a win.

1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year.

2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear/similar objective.

Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach…

Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview.

To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies.

I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree/number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities.

Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree/number theory/inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.

The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving.

If that were the case then a normal, well accomplished software engineer shouldn't need to "grind" leetcode to pass an interview.

its just a cargo cult. Getting someone to do a code review is a much much better test of skill:

Do they ask questions?

are they kind in their assertions?

At what point do they go "I don't know"?

Do they concentrate on style or substance?

do they raise an issue with a lack of comments?

do they ask why the description of the PR is so vague?

When they get a push back, are they aggressive?

All of those are much better tests than "rewrite a thing that a library would do for you already"

No, what this shows is that the skill range for accomplished professional software devs is absolutely massive. What these companies want is to find the tail end of this very wide distribution. Leetcode interviews do a decent job at this. If you have been coding for a decade and can't do leetcode mediums with almost no prep, and hards with a moderate refresher on data structures, then you're simply not the in the right tail of the skill distribution and they don't want you. This is what so many in our industry can't accept: you're just not talented enough to earn a FAANG job.

I mean it doesn't, because I'm at a FAANG, At a FAANG you are infantalised from the very start, sure you passed a very difficult interview where you have to balance a binary tree efficiently as possible. But you're going to use none of those skills here.

what you actually end up doing is copy/pasting some random code you found using internal code search, because the sensible way of doing it can't happen as that would involve porting a thirdparty library, and doing all the procedural work that follows.

so you hack some shit together, ship out out and hope that it doesn't break. You then decommission the nasty hack you shipped last year and claim credit for innovating. Is your product not hitting the right metrics? loosing users? doesn't matter, so long as the super boss is happy that you've hammered in the REST API for the stupid AI interface, you're not going to get fired.

In a startup/small company, if you fuck up, the whole place is going under. Need metrics? you'll need to find a small, cheap and effective system.

Here, we just record then entire world and then throw hundreds of thousands of machines at it to make a vaguly SQL interface. Don't worry about normalising your data, or packing it efficiently just make a 72 column table, and fill it full of random JSON shit. Need to alter a metrics? just add a new column.

In short, don't praise or assume that FAANGs are any good at anything other than making money. They are effectively a high budget marvel movie, Sure they have a big set, but most of it is held together with tape and labour. Look round the side and you'll see its all wood, glue and gaffer tape.

FAANGs want the top .1% of developers, they don't necessarily need them for most roles. But the point is to hire developers that you could put into any role in the company within reason and have them be successful. 99% of development work at a FAANG is pretty unexceptional and doesn't require exceptional developers. They hire for that exceptional 1%.

FAANGS want a load of loyal, naive people who are willing to work loads of overtime and not ask too many questions. Who better than posh kids from great universities who haven't quite figured out that life isn't a meritocracy yet!?

Sure they also want the top 0.1%, but they have a different interview track. Do you think all those OpenAI engineers that were going to follow Altman were asked to do leetcode?

I don't know about OpenAI specifically, but I have heard of interviews at other top ML research positions were partly based on leetcode problems.

Background:

I'm in a FAANG type company now, a YC company, 3000+ engineers. I'm a Staff SWE with 20+ years of experience (ECE degree) and make $600k+ per year. I've went through the promo cycle here (it sucks).

I can't do any leet hards and can do leet mediums after studying. Some easy's take me a couple of tries. I usually do very poorly in interview coding exercises.

** throwaway , main account is 10+ years old.

If you are lucky and join/lead/get a new project off the ground, then you'll also grow.

If you're just trying to move the dial on a normal project, then its very difficult to make any kind of headway. You are surrounded by overly enthusiastic hall monitor types who will put in more hours than you, or post more than you.

LC tests typically copy problems from the university the interviewer graduated from. College programs differ, so this is really a case of what you were introduced to.

There's a fairly popular online LC test company in my corner of the world which was formed by graduates and lecturers from a certain university and they started out by just giving the problems from the curriculum. Result was heavy bias in favour of students and alumni of that university.

Sure I can. By the time you get to Leetcode hard, these aren't just "can you derive the answer". The questions by design take 45+ minutes and have some weird quirk in it that is nominally related to the core concept being tested. These aren't necessarily meant to be done on the fly during an interview period.

>Not being able to see up the mountain doesn’t imply there are no climbers above you.

a better analogy is that youre on a road and you see a freeway above you. The people above you aren't "better", they are simply on another road, to another destination. But they aren't necessarily worse either. They could be on their way to a dead end job or could be a billionaire CEO.

That is to say, it's useless comparing yourself to other people you don't know. Everyone has their story.

So I'm not sure we're interpreting the same conclusion here unless you think trick questions are a mark of a "good engineer".

>You cannot argue against general rule by pointing out specialized exceptions.

Lertcode hards in interviews have been getting more common for a decade now. At what point do we stop pretending that more cats aren't losing their 4th leg and announce an epidemic?

It shouldn't be common, but it's becoming more common. I haven't seen any claims in any conversion even disagree with the notion, let alone provide hard evidence.

This is how I learned mathematics for example.

After you have learnt enough of the special cases (trees) you start to be able to connect them and see their relation (the forest).

Interviews are like exams but you don't have any clue what topics are on the test. If Leetcode was some licensed, standardized approach to getting some license to verify my ability to code myself out of a paper bag: I'd hate it, but I'd grit my teeth and study it. exams can be studied for.

But it isn't, so I can be studying leetcode questions and be hit by a dozen other topics. I don't have time to study everything, and the market right now isn't worth pinpointing specific companies unless you have a stellar reference.

>I’d say it’s a pretty good proxy for work ethic at crunch time as well.

I couldn't disagree more. Someone so prepared for interviews have the least skin in the game. Layoffs come and they didn't work > 40 hours but were otherwise excellent? oh well, get another job in a month because interviews are a breeze for them because they breathe DS&A.

>why would a company want to hire someone who has external obligations?

I'd love to know the answer here as well. Why do companies internally penalize workers who were laid off, but then try to "steal" currently happy employees but make them jump through these hoops? The logic seems backwards; interviews should be hard and depress wages for the laid off, desperate workers so you can get a desperate unicorn. But you want someone who lacks the time to study because of current job obligations to get to an offer faster. Their proof of work ethic is being employed to begin with.

Most companies are building products anyway.

We had one person who worked on [censored] 20 years ago, then was manager of [non-programmers, rest censored] - now wants to get back into coding - can this person still code? If so I want them, but if they have forgotten everything... I of course censored details for privacy reasons.

External obligations like full time employment and a family?

I've done tests like this for some companies. It felt a lot fairer and more closely resembling the actual work environment than live leet-code interviews, with biased interviewer(s) and a stress factor that's not a part of the actual job.

They will also be able to use ChatGPT on the job. And StackOverflow. And Google. If they know how to use tools available to solve a problem, that will benefit them on the job.

If you're testing them for what ChatGPT can already solve, then are the skills being tested worth anything, in this day and age?

Take-home LeetCode, even with cheating will still filter out a good chunk of candidates. Those who are not motivated enough or those who don't even know how to use the available help. You'll still be able to rank those who solved the task. You'll still see the produced code and be able to judge it.

Like other commenter points out, you can always follow up the take-home LeetCode. Usually, it becomes apparent really quickly if a candidate solved it on their own.

I wonder if either of the following could be cost-effective:

(a) Fly the candidate to a company office, where their compute usage could be casually monitored by an employee.

(b) Use high-quality proctoring services that are nearby to the candidate. E.g., give them 1-2 days in a coworking space, and hire a proctor to verify that thy're not egregiously using tools like ChatGPT.

Or alternatively, would it suffice to just have a long conversation with the candidate about their solution? E.g. what design trade-offs they considered, or how might they adapt their solution to certain changes in the requirements.

Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?

Yes. Because interviewing is

1. hard, but no company has proper full time proctors. So "expert interviewers" are a rarity

2. not standardized in the slightest. So your performance varies entirely by the interviewer, their style, and their mood that day.

3. some weird blind test where you hope you studied the right topics. You're not getting the best out of a candidate, you're basically hoping they read your mind and know exactly what you want them to say.

>Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?

Sure. but that's a universal problem. "It's who you know, not what you know" is advice that has spanned centuries. I can't even blame the modern tech industry for that one.

That + the above issues with interviewing mean you're always going to go with a referral over a random applicant.

2. All tech companies I’ve worked at since around 2015 have completely standardized interview questions, sometimes also hosted in a GitHub repo where any employee is free to comment or even open a PR to request a change. Every candidate gets the same questions. This thing where “faang” interviewers just pull a random LC question out of their ass is complete insanity to me. An organized set of questions takes a senior engineer like a week to organize and commit to… And if your questions can be memorized and recited by rote memory and the candidate can do well on it without the proctor knowing, then your questions are BAD or your proctor is a moron.

3. I’ve never worked anywhere where I would describe the interview like this. Even the startup where I was the first engineer and there was no formal “test”, it was an hour long chat with the technical cofounder where he grilled me about coding skills and past experience/accomplishments. I won’t take a job if the interview isn’t asking me things that focus on my existing experience and skills, it’s a red flag about the company culture in general.

As for your “universal problem,” I disagree with fatalistic takes where you just throw your hands up and say “whatever shall we do” all the while YOU are the one benefitting from the system that cannot be changed. This is how simple-minded people think about the world.

2&3. I wish I could relate. I work in games, fwiw, so maybe it's simply more wild west than the other domains in such regardss. It's not even that I can't answer some of the questions, but if I'm asked a question on CPU architecture after I spent my time studying a bunch of C/++ trivia, I'm not going to answer the former as confidently since I'm pulling out knoweldge from a 3 year memory bank that I happened to work with at work.

>all the while YOU are the one benefitting from the system that cannot be changed.

I am? I'm a year out of a job and I sure wish I had a referral. My last studio shut down so those references scattered all over.

But for "whatever shall we do"... I don't have some magic perfect interview, but a few basic steps to save everyone's time:

1. we don't need 5-10+ rounds of interviews and 3 months just to make sure a candidate isn't a lemon. IMO if it's over 3 rounds (not including an HR call for basic alignment), there's some process that really isn't necessary. You dont need to speak to a CEO unless you're applying as a director or executive yourself. You don't need to meet every team member separately for their variation of an interview

2. Ghost jobs absolutely need to be regulated. I'm surprised it's even legal to lie to your shareholders and say "we're always growing" when half your postings have little intention of attracting a candidate. At the very least a job posting should delineate between urgent (hired withing 1-2 weeks of response), "normal" (2-4 week process), and "cold" (6+ week process, non-necessary role).

3. jobs should in fact give a general direction of what kinds of technical questions you expect to be asked for that portion. Who does it really benefit if one candidate happened to study leetcode (and the right kind of leetcode), but the other was focusing on system design, or questions about their specific industry problems solved? Or domain specific probblems?

Just a few ways to be honest, efficient, and bring out the best in candidates. Interviews shouldn't be so hostile to the labor the company clearly requires.

> if your questions can be memorized and recited by rote memory and the candidate can do well on it without the proctor knowing, then your questions are BAD or your proctor is a moron.

I agree in spirit. My only caveat sympathizing with interviewers is that most questions can indeed be "memorized", and arguably all questions/practices can be studied for. And there is some merit to trying to figure out how someone approaches a new problem. I think that approach is highly inefficient when you do in fact mostly want someone who "already memorized" the right domain knowledge, but I digress.

But people and their experiences are diverse. Without knowing their background (and again, some people seem to read the resume for the first time during the interview) you are never going to surprise 100% of your candidates with the same question bank. But that may be too much of a burden on trying to cater every inerview for every promising candidaet.

That isn't always true. When I interview HR gives me the exact questions I'm allowed to ask. These are vetted both to prevent me from asking something illegal, and also by research to get the type of things useful for interviews. Sometimes it is annoying - you can easially finish the interview with a great score but I have no clue if you can write code or not. However we are carefully trained on how to ask the questions and how to grade them.

I was mostly referring to technical tests, but I understand there are definitely some set of questions you need to ask no matter what. I don't really knock recruiters too much for repeating the usual "are you authorized to work in the US" kinda stuff even though it is the first question on their job application.

How is this any less discriminatory than any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare? Non-assessment based interviews end up being vibes based which is much more discriminatory.

because most other assessment based interviews are based on what you do on the job, likely stuff you've done at previous jobs as well. Less prep time when you spent thousands of hours already as a career.

For example, at my current job, we hire web developers with Rails experience. Our technical interview process consists of either a pair programming session or an async/take-home task (candidate’s choice) which requires the candidate to implement a small feature in a Rails codebase. We do have some room to improve on objective evaluation of the candidate’s performance, but there is a test suite and a rubric which we use to evaluate their work. None of this should require that the candidate study, unless they’re coming in to the interview without Rails experience.

If you happen to have Rails experience but it was several jobs ago, the task we give you is basic enough that you should be able to Google what you need during the task to refresh your memory fairly quickly. In fact, I did this when I applied, having not worked with Rails in a number of years.

Edit: My main point is, even if you technically do have to "study" (really, just Google a few basic Rails concepts) if you're rusty, everything you do is preparing you for the actual job. Studying how to implement a hashmap, or computing the longest palindrome from a string of characters, or whatever other harebrained problem FAANG etc want to ask, is 99% of the time not really helping you prepare for those jobs.

It can make the process fairer but it's not a given. You can do the classic "no dogs, no blacks no Irish," and that was a standard across pubs in England. It certainly wasn't fair, unless you were racist.

If you're committed to fairness, then a standard will help. It gives you a clear point to fix and improve things and something you can use to measure if you're achieving your stated goals. That's definitely something you can't do if you're just making things up as you go along.

And yes, I made a deliberately provocative statement. I'm obviously not saying whiteboard tests are the equivalent of segregation.

...a standardized test? No. There are tests. They sure as heck aren't standardized.

Maybe they should be, since everyone seems to be doing the same thing.

This is what privilege looks like. The inability to see barriers that affect others in a worse position.

Standards do not imply fairness only consistency.

You got a test that filters out people who lack the time to train for these tests. Basically, devs with a life (see family)

Many companies have question banks that are specially designed to be fair/have some contextual relevance (ideally) to some "realistic" problem. Or at least, many of the companies I've interviewed at follow this model. I consider these coding questions to be "leetcode" style because at the end of the day they are an isolated coding problem, even though they may not be a problem from leetcode verbatim.

Companies that execute on that style of interview well are generally fairly pleasant interviews, at least in my experience. Good companies/interviewers will gauge more than just the final code to determine a hire or no hire. And a large portion of companies also have hiring ratings on a scale to make it less binary.

This is ironic considering these companies have forced mandatory DEI seminars (which I have no problem with btw), inclusive language, #EveryoneCanCode, and so on.

But despite all this, you end up with teams and organizations that are 99% of the same X somehow. Replace X with race, school, even state from home country sometimes.

You know there are websites where people share all the interview questions to these hard interviews / referrals exclusively in their language and behind a pay or rep wall? And there are Telegram groups where international students leaks the questions or do interviews in place for one another.

It’s inevitable these types of issues arise when there’s so much at stake, ex: in just 5 years, a $200k TC advantage at a top company, becomes $1m or more with appreciation.

I just really dislike the veneer of “fairness” when there are so many problems with the process, even beyond the questions that have nothing to do with the job.

Though usually the intersection of people running DEI initiatives and those people make a large set. Assimilated gay people love talking shit about how trans people make "us" look bad.

Question banks that are too small: leaked on eastern forums immediately, candidates show up reading answers out to you (some of the guides include guidance on when to pretend to think, I am not kidding).

The idealized version of "question banks" might work. The real one does not; you'd require employees constantly scouring forums in every language known to mankind, immediately removing anything that gets leaked. On top of that you'd probably require a competent committee overseeing all questions in the bank constantly and ensuring the lack of variance in difficulty.

Source: I interviewed at and for Goog and Pltr.

There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know.

If they BSed their way through a leetcode interview, then they probably won't make it past a behavioral interview where they have to go in depth on some past project. And if they BSed that as well as every other round, then hey maybe they are crafty enough to succeed at the actual job.

I think this is where our different opinions come from, while we agree on the other aspects.

In my personal experience, I have never felt that the hire/no-hire decision relied exclusively on my ability of solving the presented problem; I have passed interviews where I did not solve the LC-style problem optimally but I communicated clearly, picked up on hints, was aware of when I hit "walls" and provided working but less than ideal alternatives when I could not figure out the neat tricks.

Reading through the thread it seems that my experience is not universal, and the majority here have had less pleasant interviews, so I understand where you are coming from.

I have been rejected for one mediocre interview among many good ones. Or the other way around accepted even though I didn't perform well.

Sometimes the interviewer works with me. Sometimes against me. Sometimes a war story impresseses positively, sometimes raises suspicions.

At this point it feels like gambling.

I have also ran almost 400 interviews on the other side over the years, and to me it seems quite clear when somebody cannot write code at all. I like to think I am not biased. But who knows.

it changes immensely based on the job market. I've defintiely tanked some inerviews hard, stumbling on softball questions that shoulda been a bullet point. But I get pretty far or even gotten offers.

The last 12-18 months though? I've had interviews that felt like a dream but got zero follow up to. Been ghosted after seemingly final rounds where I spent 5+ hours on technical tests. It's not even enough to "understand the problem and communicate steps". You gotta be flawless, and you still might be cut compared to 3 years ago where a "C" performance could still land multiple offers as long as your experience made up for the quiz questions.

I dodged the .com bust because I worked for the U.S. DoD at the time.

But I got laid off for the first time during last year's "15% bloodbath".

If I compare my current job search vs. all of my job searches in the past:

(1) As parent comment said, the bar seems to be much higher. I've thought that I did really well on some interviews, only to not get an offer.

(2) Some interview processes are way more rigorous. For a DevTech role within nVidia, I had 12 interviews + 2 take-home problems. (BTW, the take home problems were incredibly fun. Well done nVidia!)

(3) I've finally accepted a job offer from a large, established tech company, and the pre-onboarding process is amazingly slow. I accepted the offer a month ago and still don't have a start date. In a better job market either (a) they'd probably work harder to be good about this stuff, or (b) I'd just take a different job because of the delay.

That's ridiculous, tho.

Did they really not have enough information on the 11th interview to know whether or not they wanted to hire you?

I'd prefer to not be more specific; I chose the word Eastern on purpose.

For DEI committees reading this: I am both eastern european and asian, so I hope to be exempt from any scrutiny.

I wanted to say Eastern, as I have examples from both Asia and East Europe.

I wished to not be more specific so as to not derail the discussion into "user kidintech implied that nation X has a tendency to cheat".

Also, IMHO, blanket generalizations like "Asia" and "Eastern Europe" in such contexts can actually be more offensive than just mentioning the one country where the thing happens since you're basically painting with tar a whole sub-continent with dozens of different countries, just for the things happening in one country.

What I mean is, if by Eastern Europe, you actually mean some dodgy Russian forums, I think a lot of Eastern Europeans from Bulgaria all the way to Poland and the Baltics might feel offended of being included since we are not the same.

You are interested in Eastern Europe, so you should be familiar with olympiads; ask around any circle of ex-olympiad participants and you are bound to find something.

I am not sorry if you took offense; you're either from one of these countries and are clueless to the circles that exist next to you, or you are not from one of these countries and are trying to be offended on behalf of others.

You mean the current FAANG market paying top dollar. I know plenty of unknown companies taking B candidates because they aren't paying top dollar (in Europe at least)

>Who's fault is it really?

The governments and central banks for devaluing the currency post-2008 with their zero interest rates, causing the value of savings and wages to plummet and the value of assets, housing and stonks to skyrocket, causing people to chase get rich quick schemes on the stock market and on the jobs market. Coupled with the VC promoting for an unsustainable growth (more like pump and dump) of so called "tech companies" who's products were not economically viable from the get go, they just survived on zero-interest money and fake promises, artificially boosting the demand for SW workers casing many young people to go into tech just to chase money, money that's now gone and so is the demand for coders.

Without this artificial demand for devs caused by zero rates and overhype in the tech industry of financially unsustainable products that were banking on skirting the local laws (AirBnB, Uber, etc), then those people chasing money would have went into finance or investment banking to chase money there instead of causing a huge backlog of candidates in tech. Just my 0.02$

in my experience: not these days. And I work in games, so "top dollar" was never in question.

>My 0.02$

That's a fair take. Tech in some ways was indeed a necessity with a huge reach, so I don't think the overhype was the difference between being a trillion dollar industry and a million dollar one. But tech would probably still be a billion dollar industry without all the factors you mentioned.

Games... well, stability was never a factor, and I knew that going in. It's a shame they are doing the exact same pump and dump schemes tech has fallen into. And it's not like layoffs were uncommon after a project finished; it's just that they are doing it purely for better looking earnings call instead of "we cannot keep funding studios anymore".

Or by "cheating" are you specifically referring to the lying cheating treasonous fraud from New York who was just found guilty of 34 felonies to cover up cheating on his wife with a porn star to inflence the election?

Why are you double-dipping on examples? If people don’t know their geography it’s meaningless, and if they do (like me) it makes you seem disingenuous.

Oh but then you bring up politics so it makes sense. Fuck this bullshit world, it’s so exhausting.

The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can't write code. Yes, there's false positives, but there's also people brute focing their way through via copy & paste.

This doesn't manifest as a person who can't do any task, just as a person that's slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.

But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.

As an early 2000s integrator/analytics I learned to write code when someone watches out of interest or straight time pressure (still taxing sometimes). But most developers that I know intellectually curl up in such situation, regardless of their skill or performance levels. We worked with one very math-y low-level-skilled guy whom our clients described as “literally freezes for an hour without moving, should we pay for it?” when he did field work. He was a very strong developer otherwise.

Not that a company must hire or want these people, but the idea of writing code under uncanny pressure all day makes as much sense as that swordfish scene.

Further still, I get push back with folks citing self-prescribed medical conditions, but the same people generally display the same behaviours during the working day.

So other than contract to hire, which typically limits you to people with a job, I don't personally have a better way.

I can't speak to the statistical claim that "those people are more likely to freeze no matter the interview."

But just my personal anecdote: I do fine on take-home coding tests, but I freeze up on live-coding tests.

This is one reason I'm vexed by the allegedly common cheating in take-home coding tests. It makes employers suspicious of the testing style that I'm best at.

For north of $2m over your career, cheating probably is the smart thing to do, especially for a borderline candidate, as there's a fair amount of evidence that the prestige on your CV will make things easier going forward.

However, my problem with take homes was never that the candidate would cheat, but rather they'll probably spend way more time than the 2 hours allocated.

I'm actually less worried about the candidate doing that, than I'm worried that the interviewer bakes in a bunch of assumptions like having a machine setup to do the task, having the specific domain knowledge and experience, and then accidentally trolls the candidate with little to no avenue for feedback.

What tipped you off?

Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

Of course, this doesn't mean I've discovered 100% of the cheaters, just the obvious ones.

> Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

To some degree. But not everyone communicates as well as they code or vice versa, and then it comes to what you're trying to qualify.

I suspect quite a lot of people who are labelled as "can't code" are freezing like I did.

  - give them ~30 minutes on their own machine
  - they get to pick the language they code in
  - I leave the room for large parts of it
  - I bring them a drink
  - I tell them I want to see what they can do and that I don't care if they complete it
  - permit them to search on the internet (as long as they don't copy/paste a solution)

  - they finish in a few minutes
  - they just can't do it, even with hints

really? they get 30 minutes + internet and they couldn't google "javascript how to get divisible by 3"? That's just bad research at that point.

However, counter point, I've had people forced on me through much of my career who just can't code for the most part, and despite being pretty reasonable about it ( it's part of the nature of the work I do ), I'm very rarely surprised by competency.

The specific failure was that I first attempted to solve by using repeated subtraction. The guy kept asking me to "solve it a different way", or saying "there is a better way to solve this". I tried using arithmetic tables, I tried using results about base10 remainders and I even tried using one of the corollaries to Fermat's little theorem to speed it up for larger inputs... every time I was told I was getting it wrong because "there was a better solution". In the end he pointed out that the only solution he would accept was use of the mod operator.

Since then I have actively kept a tally: I naturally use the mod operator an average of twice a calendar year, it has always been in personal life code when dealing with complicated geometry problems, the bit of code containing it almost always fails on some edgecase because at the point of using mod it is convoluted.

a % b = a - (b * a/b) /assuming a sane language with integer division, else cast a/b to int/

Figuring the above operation (or getting close) is when you should more or less pass, and That's a good point to show the interviewee what the operation is. That should be the point of an interview problem, to show the thought process, not that you know fancy tricks.

But alas, I was shown an XOR swap in an interview last week and spent 3 minutes deriving it on paper instead of 3 seconds saying "oh yeah, a => b and b => a" to a trick that I haven't seen since college some decade ago. The current market loves tricksters, I suppose.

And yes, the actual real world use of modulo is surprisingly sparse, despite easily imagining situations where you could use it.

``` float(9007199254740993) == int(9007199254740992) ```

If I need a "Non-Programmer Weed Out" question, I'd rather give a problem that is 1. as easy as FizzBuzz, but 2. is just 'if' statements and loops and cannot be solved by knowledge of a particular operator (or bit twiddling tricks).

This is something I can easily solve in 5-10 minutes, correctly handling every plausible corner-case.

I'm curious how common this is, statistically speaking. I'm also curious how it correlates with other things about the interviewee.

The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.

But without any "real" math at all you can do it with, eg, two counters and some if statements. Or if you recognise that there's a repeating pattern you can work out that pattern manually and just write code to emit it over and over.

So even in a language w/o a mod operator, it's not a hard problem if you understand how to solve problems with code.

At least for me it would be sufficient if the person used a function like IsMultipleOf(x, m), or Remainder(x, n). This would at least make it clear what the function did even if they didn't get the exact operator.

The other thing to note is that the mod operator works differently on different languages and platforms.

Not with positive inputs, which is the domain of FizzBuzz.

Even if you don't know what "mod" means, if you have no idea know what a remainder is, and that the problem calls for it, and you can't derive the mod operator using integer addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, then your math and problem solving skills are pretty weak, which FizzBuzz tests.

I only know it well because it was covered near the beginning of one of the first programming books I picked up (on Perl 5) and it stuck with me because it seemed wild to me that they had an operator for that.

We would both test the basics as well as go through with the candidate on how they think, how they collaborate, help them out if we felt nervousness was impacting them showing their skills, and in the end got a much better grasp on how skilled they were than if we were looking at Github repos or giving DS&A trivias to solve.

For companies this is very rational, you want non-distracted employees who can work over time.

In all my years of sw dev the number of times that would have helped vs being able to communicate and manage expectations across a swath of people is like 1:1000.

If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier?

There's a lot of valid criticism with respect to today's tech hiring practices (especially because it doesn't only affect top paying companies), but I don't feel like "I can't get ridiculously wealthy without selling my soul" is a particularly compelling one.

Everything is a proxy because, in most scenarios, there is no way to understand effectiveness of an employee until they have worked for you for a while.

Of course there are other ways, but they all carry their own risks.

That’s why referrals, imperfect as they are, carry so much sway. In theory they reduce uncertainty and require some expenditure of political capital.

If Google engineers all wore pink robes and top hats while interviewing then we'd see that everywhere.

If this was just FAANG I wouldn't even mind it. Bigger compensation means bigger hoops to jump through, artificial or otherwise. At least those bigger companies come with interview guides.

But I've been dropped Leetcode mediums on some Unity game dev jobs barely paying 40/hr with minimal benefits. Game interviews already have an absurd number of topics to try and guess you'll be quizzed on. (last interview wanted low level C memory/bit manipulation question... the one before that did Unreal Engine trivia... then the one before that decided to give me vector math and ray intersection questions), adding in random string manipulation questions when you will barely use more than concatenation on the job doesn't help with studying.

Game dev is lower paying, less structured, and more involved than typical web dev jobs.

I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. It’s a touch exploitative.

- CPU/GPU architecture

- graphics/shader programming ( I do enjoy graphics programming, but I have been asked these questions despite not applying for graphics roles)

- GPGPU

- traditional software engineering (programming patterns, architecture)

- netcode (I never applied to a network engineering position. I in fact actively avoid that part of the stack)

- general industry questions (what kinds of bugs can appear on shipping build that may not appear on debug builds?)

- a myriad of gameplay programming paradigms

- coding tests in Unity, despite applying for an unreal engine position (this has in fact happened twice now. I know Unity, but come on: can you imagine getting a javascript test for a c++ position?).

I've been asked all of these in some capacity over the years. At what point is it on me for not being some sort of omni net/graphics/engine gamedev that can answer any question on the fly, and not on the company for being paranoid about professionals studying for the skills they are clearly seeking? If someone can "study for your interview", why wouldn't you want that person? That's what they do on the job after all.

> I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator.

I'm already 8 years in, so a bit late for that. My plan is eventually to go indie, but I need a bit more time in my career before making that jump.

Despite the common advice c. 2022, getting a boring cushy tech job right now isn't very viable, so may as well stick to what I'm actually getting interviews for.

I think at least half of all programmers got into it because of video games. They know it's desirable, so they can filter almost as hard as they want.

Like, the industry is just way more jacked up than general software development. I understand your pain.

Although, if you're currently between jobs right now, you could crank out a prototype of something and see where it takes you while job hunting. Because you will always feel like you could use just a bit more time. Sometimes you just gotta do it.

I had this whole pipeline where I figured

- okay, I don't have a master's degree

- there aren't any junior graphics roles.

- I'll work in industry for 4-5 years in whatever I can while working on rendering tech, and then get a graphics programmer job this way.

- I'll be in a cushy, in-demand, highly skilled, more protected part of industry from the layoff hustle and bustle. You don't throw away engine programmers at the blink of an eye

Alas, the industry shifted around in the blink of an eye. Most studios cared less about fundamental graphics for an in-house engine as they all just changed to unreal. I did in fact get an engine programmer role, but was still first on the chopping block for layoffs. The industry tighted the heck up over the last 18 months and my side hobby projects on github barely mattered as they wanted 5+ years of graphics experience. Back in the catch 22 I was trying to avoid with all this prep.

I wouldn't say my dreams are crashing down, but it sure did show me that nothing is truly safe, no matter how experience or well liked you are. Nor even how exploited; definitely had freinds completely underpaid that put 80+ hours into the company, and they still get cut the moment RTO is announced. You have the dream capitalist candidate but can't handle not seeing them 5 days a week with butt in seat.

>if you're currently between jobs right now, you could crank out a prototype of something and see where it takes you while job hunting.

That's the weird part. Prototypes are normally a great way to stand out. But the market here is sending all kinds of weird signals. I don't know what companies want anymore, clearly not a plain ol' hard worker.

I am still getting interviews, but they are cut short in the process or am simply ghosted. Some are botched tehnical interviews, others I have no clue. So more prototypes aren't necessarily solving my personal issues.

Well, that and how almost nobody who successfully finds employment after "grinding" leetcodes wants to remove the barriers for entry.

I think Leetcoders can't envisage a better way to assess someone than by subjecting them to the same kind of hoop-jumping you get made to do in university. They're not interviewing you for a job as there's no module on interviewing candidates on the CS curriculum, and don't have much professional experience outside of academics or software engineering. They're simulating a dissertation defence, because that's how they were assessed for their competence.

That's my charitable interpretation. If I'm being cynical, it's elitism - a way of making sure you're "one of us" (read: obnoxiously academic, Type-A personality, "logic over feelings").

Not that many, but its interesting how many are from "elite" universities. I'm in a research org for a FAANG and we often get to see all the handwringing about how we can't recruit more of people type x.

Well, if you only hire from MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc, then they are all going to look the same.

For those outside the research org, its a bit better, but its still the most uneven place I've worked.

One time in a technical interview I realized a quadtree would solve the problem they were asking. I also happened to be reading SICP and practical common lisp on the plane on the way over to the interview. (specifically the sql sdl macro chapter) Unfortunately this gave me an idea. I narrated, sketched out and pseudocoded a plist based quadtree on the whiteboard and felt pretty good about myself.

I turned around to see my interviewers were not impressed. Actually they thought I was an idiot. They didnt know what a quadtree was, and they were quite upset I used "tuples".

I assured them its very efficient, and that the compiler would take care of "the tuples".

They failed me. Moral of the story don't use common lisp in a javascript interview.

That depends very much on your world view. If you get the job, it would imply you've just cost a lot of other people $100ks. That simply can't be true, because there's a small number of such jobs.

The only way this can possibly hold is if you hold that only the "best" candidate should get the job, and by "best" you mean: the one that gets most of the leetcode questions right. But then there's no us.

Edit: I'm not in favor of leetcode interviews, and I do understand that there's a bias in interviews (which won't go away when you drop the leetcode).

I do not know how hiring is done at megacorps; but on the few occasions I participated in tech interviews, we were looking for candidates to join the team that I was on. So, what I was interested about the candidates was how well they were prepared for the kind of work our team does; and how much I would like to work with them. I am sure this second question introduces all sorts of subjective biases; but then, hey, aren't you going to spend countless future hours with that person? At least the first concern incentivised us to make sure candidates were sufficiently competent. BTW, we didn't ask leetcode-type questions.

> but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process

I am not sure I am following the argument. If there is only a handful of companies that pay well, and if you only consider companies out of that list for employment, isn't it reasonable to predict that there will be lots of other candidates who want the same, far more than the number of available positions at those companies. How, then, should those companies select from such a pool of candidates?

For those wondering what the alternative is to leetcode: a work sample test. Take a real problem your team solved recently, distill it down to remove internal-specific knowledge, and give candidates 3x the time to solve it compared to what it takes an internal dev to solve. Bonus points for having a rubric guide the scoring.

- Input from the interviewer reflects communication ability, cultural fit, and so on of the candidate.

- Input from the blind grader reflects ability of them as a team.

- Low grades count against the interviewer as well.

Bingo; now both are stakeholders in success.

OTOH, seeing how the interviewer reacts to that situation will tell you a lot about whether you really want to work there.

The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth.

The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters out a whole category of people who may actually be good. And it reinforces itself: you hire people who are good at leetcode, who will themselves possibly be good at hiring people who are good at leetcode. Does a company of leetcoders perform better than a company made of a diversity of good engineers? Not clear.

Very much a tangent, but what do you mean by a company being "ethical"?

I have a few concerns about how that term is often used in these discussions:

(1) it's treated as a binary quality, rather than some kind of continuum, and

(2) there's rarely a recognition that different persons have different conceptions of what's ethical, let alone a justification for what the writer's preferred definition is uniquely superior.

Say you got the same salary working in a company that you found more ethical, would you go for the FAANG?

Everyone is different, but it's amazing how many excuses we can find to justify doubling/tripling our salary :-).

If what Google search tells me is true the average SWE tenure is only a couple of years or so.

I might need a month or two of study (or more!) to be able to handle the harder Leetcode problems, but if I was expecting to have to do this every couple of years or so I'd consider taking some steps to maintain that knowledge between jobs.

That would probably be considerably less overall effort than forgetting it and having to cram for months every couple of years.

higher education, even job experience is no longer considered a sufficient barrier to entry.

reminds me when the guy who wrote homebrew failed the apple interview. if i recall.

ironic because they use brew so much internally.

But that would dramatically increase worker mobility, for one thing. So they don’t do that.

(“No it’s because they don’t want you to be able to test prep” that makes no sense because 99% of the way to prep for these is… exactly like test prep)

Leetcode is lazy, easy.

I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I was fast enough for the interview. Additionally, I pre-prepared ideal answers for each question in case I got stuck.

When the interview came, I got a total curveball: a question that was significantly harder than the usual ones. It didn't fit the round's theme (it was a DSA question, but I'd already aced the DSA round), was obscure enough not to be on LeetCode, and required writing a solver for a hard variant of a known algorithm. I panicked, copied the prompt into ChatGPT (despite being instructed not to use it), transcribed the result, and pretended I had recently studied the relevant algorithm.

I passed the round, nailed the other interviews, got the offer, and accepted. Later, I found out that interviewers are instructed to pick one of four specific questions for that round, and the one I got wasn't in the list.

I'm left wondering if the interviewer was trying to sink me or was just bored with the usual questions. The whole experience raised several questions for me:

Is it cheating if I already had pre-prepared answers for the questions they were supposed to ask? What's the difference between using pre-prepared answers and using Google or ChatGPT during the interview?

If the interview had gone according to plan, what was I actually demonstrating? My ability to use Google?

When the interviewer asked an impossibly difficult question, I would have failed if I answered it legit, even though I'm a good engineer. Failing such an unfair interview round doesn't serve the company's interests.

What is this interview process meant to demonstrate? My true value as an engineer lies in my ability to communicate clearly, think outside the box, identify and address technical tradeoffs, mentor juniors, and propose technical solutions that meet requirements while minimizing risks. Yet, I'm expected to solve a hard variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem in 45 minutes or I don't get the job? Why?

The whole process seems broken, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

IIUC, the interview deviated from the company's interview policies.

Could the answer simply be that the company has no intentions regarding the aberrant interview process that you experienced?

I don't think this is an issue of bad luck, its quite probably to get difficult interviews especially if you're applying to the popular names.

with all due respect I believe this is about as far from the truth as it gets. I believe the issue is that people think they have to work at FAANGs in order to be paid REALLY well which is just nuts.

I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of. instead of looking for FAANGs people should be looking at companies that have been in business for 20+ years (if publicly-traded company the easiest "measure" would be whether you would invest your own dough into that company) and then make your self indispensable there (this is much easier than it sounds) to a point where you are more valuable to the company they company is to you. This is un-achievable at FAANG but this should be everyone's career goal. once you are worth more to a company then company is to you, compensation-wise sky is the limit :)

You know people making ~800-900k at places most people have never heard of? That is what "high 6 figures" means. I have to assume you mean more like ~$180-190k?

Not trying to brag that I have well-paid friends, though it might come across that way; just corroborating the fact that it's possible for late-career professionals to make that kind of money at non-FAANG companies.

If you can get your foot in the door it's hard to beat FAANG comp on a risk-adjusted basis and they do actually employ quite a lot of SWEs, which I think is why it's such a focal point for tech jobs even though you can get similar comp in other situations.

the entire system from the ground-up is setup to convince you that you are an individual and you need to go find a job and work like everyone else (hopefully with hefty student loan and other debts) and in our industry be treated like cattle and be subjected to some crazy interview process where you have to hack on some sh*t no one cares about.

if you start thinking about yourself as a business your goals become more like “how do I make myself profitable, how do I get to the point where another business cannot effectively operate without my services.”

is this a lottery? maybe… this is easier said than done but I would rather spend my career in this chase than be an employee somewhere where 99% of my peers don’t know my name

Suppose there was a SWE union and the union has to create their own reference compensation bands. Would the union again lean towards leetcode or some other standardized test? Or just use years of experience and maybe past projects?

When weighing the “effectiveness” of leetcode interviews, it’s important to weigh that thus far SWEs have failed to effectively unionize despite e.g. the past class-action no-poaches clearly showing C-suites should be paying engineers a larger share.

However, we do require a base level of competency. We give out a 40-ish minute assessment. Two multiple choice and three coding problems.

And they’re easy. One of them is essentially “John has a 5 gallon bucket and 3 gallon bucket, how many buckets does he have?”. All you have to do is rewrite the clearly labeled circuit diagram as a Boolean expression.

Not a single person this round has passed. Several have failed the simple ones.

So while grilling people on the minutiae of a language or asking them to solve the traveling salesman is not beneficial, neither is nothing.

We should be testing floors, not ceilings

Why don't you list them here to illustrate your point?